6.07.2016

The Song of the Pipes

it is addressed thusly:

A song.

it reads:

The pipe-player plays his songMerrily, as though a dreamWere this life, the short and the longAll down-going its glinting streamWe are sad, for reasons unknownAnd the music it does not groanAnd we know, though it may seemThat we walk in silence, alone;

I once made a pipe to soundEvery color of a concert-hallWhen in it are merrily foundThe musicians' company, allOn as it were, the skylark's wingThe organ - how it does singBut the joy, the art is to callThat it is not a viol's string;

What pipe, more bright than thisMakes sounds like a human voiceIt inflects as oft as it lispsIt was one of our favorite toysA joke! A serious joke--A laugh as much as a chokeThey were fooled by one of the boys--That they thought a man had spoke!

But so it was long beforeA pretense of speech and willThe mob that bangs at your doorAre an organ of suchlike skillIt bears a torch as it walksAnd words are such as it talksIt is deadly! With death it may killThat poor soul it seemingly stalks;

Now let me tell you a taleOf an organ of light and shadeTo mimic us, it cannot failIn this it was perfectly madeThey will see it is seemingly strongAnd to rule it is fit everlong;And to know, it is always forbadeThat the pipe-player plays his song.

a postscript is here written:

This is an amalgamation of several texts. The most notable is Thomas Carlyle's relation of the democratic masses as being a simulacrum of a single human voice, as though they were a great pipe that a wind happened to be passing through that made them sound like they were speaking, and if speaking, made it seem like they were thinking and together had a mind and a will.

The 'organ of light and shade' - which consists, like most of these pipe-instruments (the mob certainly loves pipe-bombs) of a series of tubes. Sometimes there is light in the tubes, and sometimes, there is shadow. And what has begun as a joke - an a-musement, of copying certain human activities, like in the case of the mob, becomes a serious instrument. We would be led to believe that the 'viol' stop on the organ is actually a string section.

And we are, as we were about the mob, required not to consider the man working the keyboard. (We may hope he is well tempered.)

Seismographic Radar

A Poem

Is a curious device which is not unlike a part of an unknown whole; or as if a watchmaker had inspiration to make all of the parts of the watch before knowing either what it was or that he was a watchmaker at all.

It speaks to and from that mode of thinking which is almost purely masculine; it is not unlike music but is not music, it is the cousin of music and its companion. It has a tripartite nature like music in rhythm, rhymes and narrative.

It is almost pure play, and so is accused of mere cleverness or frivolity, but it is also in deadly earnest. In this way, it is like a play of masks or a pageant, but it must be kept with an eye that sees beyond the device itself.

It is an object both of time and space; the mystery of representation and symbol that is in art and music finds its truest expression here. It is still and yet moves, if it is ugly it is instead grotesque, it shocks and appalls the earthly senses, but the incision is clean; the heart is pulled free if but for a moment to ascertain what is really there.

A Purpose

To call to mind that which persists through the flux of time in bright relief of silver and gold -- as it was of old.